Sun Microsystems Inc took exception to a fairly negative piece in the Wall Street Journal: the corporate focus appeared to conclude that Sun has little to offer investors. The paper interviewed Scott McNealy, Bill Raduchel, Jay Puri, Mike Lehman, Ed Zander, Phil Samper, Bill Joy and Andy Bechtolsheim and although Sun admits most of the facts are basically accurate, it has disputes some of the points raised and says the views of some Sun customers the Journal spoke to were taken out of context. In defining its business performance, Sun says the piece failed to mention its healthy balance sheet, cost controls and revenue per employee. After 12 years, it has grown to become the seventh largest systems company in the US – only Compaq Computer Corp has done better, it believes. Responding to operating system and software issues raised, it says 7,500 applications are shipping for Solaris 1.X with 900 being converted; 2,600 up on Solaris 2.X with a further 2,000 coming; and 175 for Solaris x86 with 800 more in the works. It points to 1.6m Solaris licences with 350,000 new ones a year, and says the fastest-growing part of the Solaris business is servers, all of which need Solaris 2. It believes SunSoft is already through the software transition on symmetric multiprocessing that the likes of Hewlett-Packard Co and IBM Corp still have to make. On desktops it agrees with the Journal’s Digital Equipment Corp and Silicon Graphics Inc comparisons, but not the Hewlett or iAPX86 price-performance charts.
